We chose StarWind Mainly because of the cost compared to other vendors.
Simplicity of setup was also a major factor and I like the fact that you don’t need a vendor
certified engineer to perform the installation.

John Harris, Windows System Administrator, Department of Physics,
University of Oxford

“Price + Simplicity. StarWind VSAN offers great pricing and allows us to get work done without expensive
custom hardware. It also makes getting back online quick and easy after an outage or hardware failure.“

StarWind VSAN eliminates any need in physical shared storage by simply mirroring internal hard disks and flash between hypervisor servers. It maintains high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources.

No restrictions on # of sockets, cores, or features. Editions vary only by usable capacity and # of nodes per license.
StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V installs as a Windows-native application directly in the Hyper-V parent partition. It also integrates with Windows Server management and security tools.

We keep it simple here: socket-derived licensing, capacity limitations, and feature restrictions are all gone for good!
StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a ready-to-go Linux VM that installs on the cluster nodes. Once installed, Virtual SAN creates a fault-tolerant storage pool available to the entire vSphere cluster. VSAN for vSphere users get unrestricted features, storage capacity, and outstanding cost-efficiency.

Free Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solution. StarWind VSAN Free provides an ample set of virtualization tools for admins, developers, and IT geeks who have the skills necessary to maintain virtualization infrastructures.
VSAN free product is designed for production purposes, POC (Proof of Concept), or test and development.

Exceptional Simplicity

StarWind Virtual SAN runs as a native hypervisor component or in VM, and it does not require any
deep storage and network administration or UNIX management skills. A typical system administrator
with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware or Windows can install, configure and maintain VSAN
operations.

COST EFFICIENCY

StarWind Virtual SAN cuts the costs at least in half, meaning both Operational and Capital
Expenditure. It eliminates the actual physical shared storage, corresponding infrastructure,
associated deployment and maintenance activities. StarWind VSAN works on commodity hardware, so
there’s not only less hardware to purchase and maintain, but also the required hardware is
inexpensive.

Performance and Features

Performance is uncompromised by the minimalistic hardware footprint, reduced deployment and
management costs. StarWind Virtual SAN brings to the table server-side flash and memory caches,
log-structuring and an absolutely minimalistic I/O path. The resulting performance is unmatched by
either typical virtual appliances or physical shared storage.

Log-structured Write Cache is a caching technology tailored for intense virtualized workloads. By effectively combining the fast memory like flash or RAM and a tiny portion of your storage, this feature optimizes the way data is written to the underlying storage. As a result, all your applications always get the resiliency and performance that they need.

StarWind Virtual SAN extends existing workloads to Azure public cloud, transforming the existing infrastructure into Hybrid Cloud. StarWind distributes highly available shared storage between the clouds, providing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery for optimal RTPO. The Hyper-V ecosystem is managed by such familiar and convenient orchestrators as StarWind Manager, Hyper-V, and SCVMM.

StarWind ProActive Support provides your business with an unprecedented level of services availability and data security by preventing failures proactively instead of dealing with consequences. In the case of a problem, StarWind engineer gets an alert and reaches out to you to resolve it, saving your valuable time and efforts.

StarWind Stretched Clustering provides organizations with constant applications uptime and uninterrupted business continuity. The Stretched Clustering support allows avoiding the production downtime due to Live Migration between the geographical locations. Moreover, the IT infrastructure resources are utilized by 100% thanks to active-active shared storage replication.

NFS (Network File System) is a distributed system protocol providing users with the remote access to data over a shared network just if it was kept locally. StarWind implementation of NFS eliminates the need for dedicated shared storage, so CAPEX and OPEX become significantly lower. Also, it merges the storage and compute layers allowing the cluster to go well with only two nodes.

SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) provides a simple and unified way to orchestrate the entire storage infrastructure. StarWind SMI-S provider, in its turn, delivers system and storage administrators the single “pane of glass” management over SCVMM and OpenStack. Thanks to SMI-S support, most operations can be performed from console and automated.

The “data locality” approach effectively maximizes the performance of the IT infrastructure by keeping compute and storage resources for every virtual machine on its physical node. This allows processing most of the I/O locally, eliminating the problem of slow data transfer through interconnect fabrics and providing lower latency.

StarWind Web-based Management provides system administrators with the ability to access and manage their StarWind infrastructure via HTML5 web console from any remote location. This functionality delivers the full control over the storage-related operations from a PC or Android, iOS or Windows mobile device.

The “grid architecture” allows building a highly fault-tolerant cluster by connecting a number of nodes together into a single grid. Such cluster topology provides a high rate of resiliency, allowing the cluster to stay operational even after multiple nodes failure while maintaining the principle of “data locality” for ultimate performance.

StarWind Virtual SAN implements VM and flash-friendly space reduction
technologies such as in-line deduplication and compression. The result increases usable capacity
of all-flash configurations, boosts I/O performance as more data can be pinpointed to virtually
"bigger" de-duplicated caches. Also, it prolongs flash life reducing the amount of write
operations.

StarWind Virtual SAN allows both Scale-Up and Scale-Out architectures. Capacity can be increased by simply throwing more capacity into the existing
storage cluster node. Adding a new host with its own CPU, RAM and internal storage can scale
storage capacity, I/O performance and VMs.

StarWind Virtual SAN uses industry-standard uplink protocols,
integrating with almost all virtual environments and technologies. It exposes: SMB3 with dialect
features such as SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel, NFSv4.1 and iSCSI, VVols iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics and iSER. As a
result, StarWind VSAN can merge with any virtual environments.

Virtual SAN simply "mirrors" the actual storage and caches between
the given numbers of hosts creating a fault-tolerant storage pool. It is completely up to the
system administrator as to how many replicas of a particular VM or LUN are kept alive and how
many active storage controllers a cluster should use.

As an extension of the hypervisor, provides both outstanding
performance and unified administration using hypervisor-specific management tools. VSAN simply
integrates and operates with all major virtualization platforms running on Hyper-V
and Windows as a native application together with vSphere or Xen nested inside a VM. Non-virtualized clusters are also fully
supported.

StarWind Virtual SAN also runs on a dedicated set of hosts in order
to create a separated storage layer. The differentiation of compute and storage layers is
optimum if there is need to grow by capacity only. Typical use cases are shared storage for huge
clustered SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, NoSQL deployments and an inexpensive block
back-end for Scale-Out File Servers.

Virtual SAN reduces I/O latency and eliminates network traffic to an
absolute minimum by utilizing distributed RAM and flash-based caches. As a result, it improves
performance and reliability without unnecessary cost. Caches are kept coherent between multiple
hosts in order that a lightning-fast write-back policy is safe and achievable with commodity hardware.

Virtual SAN ensures that the mission-critical business data is
replicated to a disaster recovery site, following the "3-2-1 backup rule".
Replication is implemented to be asynchronous, background, deduplication,
and compression-aware, as well as snapshot-based. Additionally, StarWind VSAN supports
asynchronous replication to private and public cloud such as Azure.

StarWind Automated Storage Tiering eliminates the need in manual intervention when assigning storage to applications since the data flow between tiers is fully automated. Moreover, companies don’t have to go all-flash as Automated Storage Tiering effectively matches workload-intensive applications with a high performing storage, so that no overprovisioning occurs.

Virtual Tape Library (VTL) is an optional included feature that eliminates the need for physical tape by retaining all data on
inexpensive, fast and high-capacity drives, therefore dramatically reducing backup windows.

Virtual SAN provisions and manages storage with VM workloads in mind.
General-purpose storage arrays are invariably the most appropriate candidates to serve
hypervisors. VSAN uses Log-Structured File System and sophisticated caching in order to avoid random I/O to the full, but still without requiring cost all-flash
storage.

StarWind Swordfish Plugin allows to easily manage, allocate and scale infrastructures based on StarWind Virtual SAN as well as setups with StarWind VSAN being part of a bigger storage infrastructure. Swordfish API comes as a part of VSAN installation, making StarWind deployment extra simple and eliminating the need to install additional software to manage the infrastructure.

Thank you for your application!

To download the software products please make your choice below. An installer link and the license key will be sent
to the e-mail address you specify. Please check the Free vs. Paid
document if you are uncertain of the StarWind Virtual SAN version.
A totally unrestricted NFR (Not For Resale) version of StarWind Virtual SAN is available for certain use cases. Learn more here.
StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V release notes are available here.

To download the software products please make your choice below. An installer link and the license key will be sent
to the e-mail address you specify. Please check the Free vs. Paid
document if you are uncertain of the StarWind Virtual SAN version.
A totally unrestricted NFR (Not For Resale) version of StarWind Virtual SAN is available for certain use cases. Learn more here.
Find StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere release notes here.

StarWind Cloud VTL integrates a cost-efficient Amazon S3 and Glacier cloud storage tier into the backup infrastructure, eliminating costly tape backup processes and delivering ransomware protection.
Learn more about the solution here.
To download the free software product, please, fill in the form below. An installer link and a license key, if applicable, will be sent to the e-mail address you specify.
The Release Notes can be found here.

StarWind VTL is a backup storage solution designed to eliminate costly tape backup processes while meeting regulatory data archival and retention
requirements using on-premises Virtual Tape Libraries with cloud and object storage tier.
Learn more here. To download the software product please fill out the form below.
An installer link and a license key, if applicable, will be sent to the e-mail address you specify.
The Release Notes can be found here.

StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance is a Linux-based virtual machine with pre-configured StarWind Virtual SAN.
It provides the most straightforward way to test StarWind Virtual SAN functionality on any infrastructure.
You can learn more about StarWind VSA here.
To download the software product, please, fill in the form below.
An installer link will be sent to the e-mail address you specify.

StarWind V2V Converter is a free tool that allows VMs’ cloning and conversion from one format to another.
It supports such formats as VHD(X), VMDK, IMG and QCOW.
Learn more details about StarWind V2V Converter here.
To download the software product, please, fill in the form below.
The installer link will be sent to the e-mail address you specify.

StarWind Deduplication Analyzer is a free portable tool for the quick assessment of data deduplication ratios.
It estimates the results of deduplication without the need for moving data to dedupe-enabled storage or evaluation kits.
More details about the product can be found here.
To download the software product, please, fill in the form.
The installer link will be sent to the e-mail address you specify.

StarWind Web-based Management allows orchestrating the StarWind-based environment from any HTML5-compatible web browser.
You always can learn more about the solution here.
To download the software product, please, fill in the form below.
The installer link will be sent to the e-mail address you specify.

StarWind Tape Redirector turns a bulky tape infrastructure into a flexible virtualization-aware backup system.
This is a free solution that gives VMs the direct access to the tape library via iSCSI.
Learn more about StarWind Tape Redirector here.
To download the software product, please, fill in the form below.
The installer link and a license key will be sent to the e-mail address you specify.

StarWind RAM Disk allows easily creating a superfast storage by converting part of RAM into a virtual storage device.
This free solution fits perfectly for testing and troubleshooting purposes.
Learn more details about RAM Disk here.
To download the software product, please, fill in the form below.
The installer link will be sent to the e-mail address you specify below.

StarWind Manager is a product for orchestrating IT environment from a single pane of glass.
This approach simplifies management and daily routines of system administrators.
More details about the solution can be found here.
To download the software product, please, fill in the form below.
The installer link will be sent to the e-mail address you specify below.

StarWind iSCSI Initiator connects two hosts for SCSI commands over IP networks exchange.
The solution enables to emulate a local storage bus over the networks.
Learn more details about StarWind iSCSI Initiator here.
To download the software product, please, fill in the form below.
The installer link will be sent to the e-mail address you specify below.

To download StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze, please, fill in the contact form below. An installer link and the license key will be sent to the e-mail address you specify.
The Release Notes can be found here.

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StarWind Cloud VTL for AWS and Veeam is a free product supported through our online community.
For customers who use the Gateway in production environment and require fast support we offer paid technical
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StarWind Cloud VTL for AWS and Veeam is a free product supported through our online community.
For customers who use the Gateway in production environment and require fast support we offer paid technical
support with strict SLAs.

Product

First Name

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Job Title

Corporate Email

Company

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You agree that StarWind Software Inc. may use the above information to accommodate your requests, keep in touch with you, and offer a better customer experience. You can withdraw your consent at any time by reaching us at dataprotection@starwind.com. For more information on how we process your personal data, please read our Privacy Policy.